


Making Ends Meet

by PrinceLee



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Citadel of Ricks, Implied Rick/Morty weirdness, Implied stripping too?, and lots of existential questioning, and some angst, can't forget the existential questioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 21:56:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12198159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrinceLee/pseuds/PrinceLee
Summary: He's just one Morty in a sea of thousands trapped in a life unlike anything he could have imagined before his Grandpa came along. Things are tough in The Citadel, and a Morty's gotta do what he can to survive.





	Making Ends Meet

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this, my first fanfiction ever, at two in the morning in less than an hour, but I did my best. Enjoy.

Another day.

In a place like this, where there's no day or night, where the sky outside of that shiny glass is the unchanging orbit of a planet he doesn't know the name of, it's easy to lose track of time. Minutes fade into hours fade into days fade into weeks. He doesn't know how long he's been here, only that it's long enough that he's sort of forgotten the faces of the kids back at school, forgotten what Mom's voice sounds like all the way.

_ Don't think about it. _

The first time he heard that phrase, Rick said it to him.

... No, not 'Rick'. Grandpa. Back then, he was still just 'Grandpa'. The guy who smelled like booze a lot, who walked into the house one day and made his mom cry for not seeing him for half her life, the guy who knew a lot about science and could do things so amazing they may as well have been magic. Grandpa.

The first time they had come to The Citadel, it had blown his mind. He was well enough acquainted with the fineries of the science Grandpa did, even if he didn't understand most of it, but seeing something like this-- seeing a crowd filled with _only_ the faces of the person he saw when he looked in the mirror and the person he had arrived with, all so incredibly similar save for small deviations (a mole here, a crooked nose there) had given him a minor existential crisis. He'd frozen in his tracks.

Grandpa had grabbed his arm and yanked him along, muttering in a voice identical to the many he heard all around him in sporadic chatter,

"Don't think about it, Morty."

The Citadel hadn't been a place they had gone to often. He was glad for it. It messed with him in a way he didn't like, in a way that far exceeded any of the deep-space horrors or bizarre geographies of other dimensions did, in a way that _mattered_. If it came down to it, was he the only _him_? Was Grandpa the only _Grandpa_? If they got separated in a crowd at The Citadel, would they ever find each other again?

He'd wanted to ask these things, but there wasn't a way he could think to ask it that would communicate the deep existential question at the core of his consciousness. There wasn't a way to ask if there was any insurance against slips like this. If there was any way to identify each other in the case they got mixed up, or if he'd just go home with some guy named Rick who looked like his Grandpa but wasn't, come home to a Mom and Dad and Summer who looked the same, maybe even thought the same, but weren't the same. If he'd ever make it back _home_ in the case that that happened.

... If it _mattered_.

There had been business at The Citadel the day it had happened. One minute they'd been walking down the center plaza, and the next--

He couldn't think of how to describe it. A plain walkway, impeccably clean. And then, it wasn't, a sudden collision of mass sending out an explosion as girders and stone and glass buckled against the force of being pushed from all angles by something abruptly inside of itself, occupying the same space. No one had been prepared for it, and for a brief moment, while his ears were still ringing, he stood there in shock with many others who'd been fortunate enough to not suddenly find their body mass melded with a floor or been killed in the shockwave.

And then the shooting started. And Grandpa had grabbed him and pushed him while running himself, shouting, "F-Fuck, Morty, stop standing around, r-run, you little idiot!"

So he had.

At some point, they'd been separated. He'd hidden in a trash can. Nothing else he could do. A short fourteen year old boy against the forces of the Galactic Federation, against a bunch of escaped Galactic criminals?

Anyone would have done the same.

Well, except for everyone he heard outside shooting, anyway.

Eventually, the noise stopped. There was a residual shockwave here and there, as parts of The Citadel collapsed from unstable architecture, and that was when he had climbed out of the trash, shaking, his yellow shirt stained.

He immediately wished he'd stayed there.

He'd never seen so much blood before. It ran into the streets, every color of the rainbow, from hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies-- Federation, criminal, Rick, Morty. The smell-- pungent metallic iron, mostly, mingled with other scents that he didn't recognize from creatures so foreign he couldn't tell their heads from their limbs-- made him gag, and he covered his mouth with grimy fingers to keep his vomit down.

The streets had been quiet then, the storefronts shattered, nothing breaking the silence except for the occasional, distant gun discharge. He'd started crying at some point, wondering if he was the only survivor, wondering if he'd be trapped in this inter-dimensional graveyard with no way to make it back home.

It turned out that only one of his fears was true.

Eventually a squad of officers-- Ricks, mostly-- found him, pointed him in the direction of a secure area away from the 'cleanup' of Federation stragglers, and he'd ended up huddled in an office building, in a sea of yellow shirts punctuated with the occasional bloodied lab coat. It was loud, and it hadn't crossed his mind to shout for Grandpa.

... If Grandpa'd lived, he hadn't come back for him after that. Then again, even if he had, would he have known it was him to begin with? Not someone else, someone with the same voice and the same face, but who looked divergent in enough little ways that he was basically a completely different person from the man he'd adventured with?

He liked to think he would. But he didn't know any more.

He liked to think that something like that would have mattered to Grandpa, too. ... But he didn't know any more. And he didn't want to.

_ Don't think about it. _

The only indication that it's time for him to get up in a timeless place like this is that he's not sleeping any more. He crawls out of bed, gets dressed, looks himself over in the mirror. He looks fine. Good enough to go to work anyway.

Things haven't been great since the destruction of the Citadel, but that's an understatement. He still doesn't know what happened, not really, just that there was a 'malfunction' with the portal technology-- that's what the news said. He does know that a lot more Morties than Ricks survived, and that for whatever reason, after the incident, portal guns were confiscated en masse. Not that that had any effect on him, anyway. He's not a Rick, but he's trapped here anyway.

Trapped with the rest of them.

And in this place, in this bizarre microcosm of a society made up only of iterations of the same two people, small differences suddenly become big ones. Morties and Morties? He can tell all his roommates in their rundown apartment from each other, and they can do the same. But Ricks? They blend together for him, if they don't have really distinguishing features.

... Or maybe it's just that he sees so many of them each day, with where he works.

He heads out of Mortytown on one of the light rails, pressed against innumerable iterations of himself and his genetic grandfather. He looks out the window, sees more of the same.

The neighborhood he gets out at isn't great, but it's better than Mortytown, at least. He passes liquor stores-- ones that sell _only_ liquor, to clarify, because beer is as common as soda pop in the register-side cases of every establishment catering to this population-- past little stores selling cheaply-made and badly working and borderline-illegal scientific gadgets, through an alleyway, into the backdoor of an establishment that has a neon light that flashes 'The Scuzzy Rick' on the front. There are other Morties in this back area, in various states of costuming, because when you're all the same, or close enough, you need to have some sort of angle to attract attention. He's been letting his hair get a little longer for that reason.

It's not like he isn't replaceable in an establishment like this, either way. But Morties will come and go as they please. Most of them won't touch a place like this to begin with, for sake of some sort of intrinsic bond between a Morty and a Rick, some silent agreement on what's taboo and what isn't.

But all of the old guys sitting out there beyond the lights? They're just Ricks to him, and _they're_ sure as hell not worrying about it. Genetics may be the same. Experiences may be similar. But they're not _his_ Grandpa.

He sighs, applies a little makeup, tries to cover the bags under his eyes. Maybe he didn't sleep as well as he thought. Through the door of the dressing room that separates the main floor from the dressing room, the music is too loud, and he hears shouting and laughter from Ricks and Morties alike.

Ricks. Morties. In a place like this, with only the two of them, it's as if they're different species, that small gap between their familial DNA widening to The Grand Canyon when they're the only two members of this population, iterated over and over.

They may as well be.

As he gets the last touches on his clothing right and heads out to the music, he tries not to think about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since the first season, I wondered about The Citadel. What it was like, why there were so many Ricks and Morties there all the time, why *some* chose to give up a globetrotting life of adventuring to sell cheap knickknacks on the street, and on and on and on. The further exploration of things at the Citadel in the third season, before and after its destruction, certainly explained more, but it gave me more questions, too. If all of these people, grandfather and grandson, are supposed to be the same person, why are some cops and some criminals, some lawyers and some factory workers? It's a unique setting to think about, and I enjoyed exploring it in some small part.
> 
> I might write a continuation if anyone actually likes it.


End file.
